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What’s Up With Us and Android

So, all of our Androidians, here’s the deal with Drumline Apps and the wonderful world of Google: it’s complicated.

Unsatisfying, we know.

But we want you to know that we’re paying attention to the comments from you guys, and we’ve also had internal discussions about the importance of Android versions, both to support the community and because we’re not sure that Apple is the only way to do things. So we’re on it.

There are myriad technical and market reasons for starting with iOS, and there are (unfortunately) several technical and market reasons that are keeping us out of Android, even though we really want to be there. For now, it will have to suffice to know that recreating DLA (it’s not as simple as porting) to Android will involve, by professional estimates, 300 hours of coding.

300 hours is just under eight weeks of work, if we had nothing else to do. But we do have other stuff to do – updating apps for iOS 7, finishing and releasing Ensemble, putting together the next big iteration of all the apps. I can hear you saying, “that has nothing to do with Android” and you’d be right. But we have to proceed with them for now to maintain the viability of the apps altogether. If we can’t sustain the biz, we won’t exist to make Android versions. The free market is a tough place.

Once we get over this hump, our goal is to enough in sales or perhaps venture capital that we can move Android’s 300 hours of work to the top of the list and take care of you guys.

This is all technical and inside-baseball stuff and again I know it’s not a satisfying answer with a release date and everything, but we wanted you guys to know that we hear you and wanted to include you in the process that we’re more-or-less forced to go through, not because we aren’t interested in Android, but because Android and Apple don’t play well together.

Android release date? We don’t know yet. But the answer is a definite yes. And we’ll keep you posted.